December 2023
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day
The 3rd Monday in January is set aside honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Take time to remember a man who was instrumental in ending racial segregation through nonviolent means.
Dr. King was a Baptist minister who advocated the use of nonviolent means to end racial segregation. He first came to national prominence during the bus boycott by African Americans in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955. He founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957 and led the 1963 March on Washington, DC. The most influential leader of African American Civil Rights during the 1960s, he was instrumental in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination in public accommodations, facilities, and employment and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Dr. King was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize for Peace. In 1970 (2 years following his assassination on April 4, 1968) a number of states and cities made his birthday, January 15th, a holiday. In 1983 legislation making the third Monday in January a federal holiday finally passed and the first observance nationwide was in 1986.